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Come on, now, let's be honest. What do we need with clicks and hits? We're just doing all this work for our own amusement. Why can't people go away and let us admire our handiwork without eating up our traffic quota?
To help free your site from unwanted, unneeded cybersurfers, I'm posting my suggestions for designing a website that will ensure no-one but the most desperately bored or most persistently slothful will linger, let alone return. This began as a ten-best list, but I realized that I could never limit it to just ten.
This is most emphatically a personal list; what deters others will vary. And just because it's listed here, doesn't mean you have to use it -- sometimes there are good reasons for not using these features: you just don't have the time to generate a one-Meg linked and illustrated file, for example. But the more tricks you have in your web-design bag, the better you can keep people from hanging around your site.
Many of these tricks are specific to Netscape Navigator, the web browser much of the world uses most often. You'll have to experiment to see what works to keep pesky Internet Explorers out of your site. And some of them apply to any site regardless of the browser used.
Finally, the order below reflects absolutely nothing of the annoyance value of the various tricks. For me, it depends on the time of the day, how much coffee I've drunk, whether I have any clients clamoring for their work, and so on, as to what bothers me most about a website. You, being you, will have your own preferences.
Just remember, variety is the spice of life: you can offend more people with many of these tricks than you will with a select few. So go ahead, go wild. And if you've got any particular favourites that I've missed, be sure to send me a message at the link below.
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Comments and suggestions to Gail van Varseveld 
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